Welcome

Welcome to the public site for the workshop Naturalism: Ethical and Metaphysical, to be held at University of Leeds on September 18-19, 2009.

In the past few decades, naturalism has been a focus of much attention both in moral philosophy and in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. This workshop brings together researchers interested in issues concerning naturalism in these areas.

Debates about naturalism in theoretical philosophy cluster around such questions as: What viable notions of naturalness are there? Do natural facts or properties provide an appropriately fundamental basis for determining, grounding, reducing, and/or explaining other facts and properties, and what is the nature of these relationships? Do naturalness facts help determine meaning or resolve vagueness? What are the connections between naturalness, fundamentality, and metaphysical determinacy? Is naturalism about a subject matter compatible with a priori knowledge of it?

Debates about naturalism in metaethics cluster around such questions as: Do evaluative and normative properties reduce, or in some other way belong, to the class of natural properties? What are natural properties? How are they involved in determining or grounding “thick” and “thin” moral properties? How are they involved in shaping reasons or motivation for action?

Beyond parallels drawn in broad strokes, existing work in these areas tends to interact remarkably little, given the many clear connections between the issues they address. This workshop aims to provide a venue for exploring these connections in greater depth and seed greater interaction in future work.

Funding for the workshop is gratefully acknowledged from the Analysis Trust, the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Metaphysics and Mind at the University of Leeds, and the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 231016.

The workshop program and other further information can be accessed via the links to your left.